Shorthand Day Symbols

When taking notes, I abbreviate the days of the week with symbols. They're
quicker to write than English abbreviated day names, and they're also more
distinct and memorable. In fact, since starting to use the symbols I've found
that it's easier to remember which day of the week it is, so now I even include
them in various web documents, which is why I've published them on the web.

I got the idea to use shorthand day symbols from Lion Kimbro, though he
advocates the use of Japanese. But the Japanese symbols are hard to learn, and
less characteristic, interdistinct, and easy to write than even three letter
English abbreviations (Sun, Mon, Tue, &c.), which is why I chose my own
instead. The origins of each of the symbols I've chosen are given below.

The Symbols

Sunday

The circle with central dot is a universally recognized symbol for the sun,
the sun of course being the etymology of the name Sunday. The central dot
presumably helps to distinguish the symbol from just a plain circle, which is
helpful since in shorthand it might be mistaken for the letter O or the number
0.

Monday

Keeping in line with the etymologies, the symbol from Monday is the moon, in
its waning crescent form (last quarter). As Wikipedia says in its article on
the moon, "Its symbol is a
crescent." Presumably since this is the most distinctive phase that the moon
goes through: circles and semicircles could be confused for other things, and a
gibbous moon would not be easily distinguishable from a circle, especially when
hand drawn.

In choosing this symbol I was worried slightly that it might be confused as
denoting the night time, the hopefully context makes that clear. Moreover, the
symbols don't really have to be recognizable out of context anyway. If I were
to have to come up with symbols for day and night for some project, I could
always use some kind of modifier to show that it's the period of the day and
not the day of the week that's intended.

Tuesday

This is the only of the symbols that I devised myself, since I couldn't find
a satisfactory existing one. The etymology of Tuesday is in the nordic god Tyr,
though in France "Mardi" has its etymology in Mars. In Japanese and Korean, the
Sun and Moon days are the same as in the occident, but the remaining five days
are named after the five elements of Chinese philosophy. Tuesday is the day of
fire in this scheme.

The symbol that I chose, a lunate latin small letter w with combining macron
above, reflects both the Japanese scheme and its position next to Monday and
Wednesday. There are many symbols for fire, but they usually either involve a
triangle, often inverted, or a triple prong, usually like a V shape with an
extra arm. Sometimes these forms are even melded into a bisected triangle, and
I've retained aspects of that in this symbol.

The lower part of the symbol is the tristave with a rounded base, and though
it was originally just a symbol for fire it also came to mean lunar nimbus, or
halo around the moon. You can hence take the macron, the line at the top, as
meaning that it's the day after the moon day. And, since the bottom tristave is
essentially a lunate w, you can take that as standing for Wednesday and the
macron meaning the day before Wednesday.

The symbol is also a nice play on the word "Tuesday", being that the middle
part of the tristave and the macrom make the letter T, the outer part of the
tristave make the letter U, and the whole tristave can be thought of as an E,
more like a lunate epsilon, on its side.

Footnote: Kate
Gladstone emailed me commenting that the lower pitchfork shape could be
perceived as a hand feeding into the upper mouth shape, which would "make a
very appropriate and memorable symbol for the day named after Tyr".
Whilst I doubt that would have subconsciously influenced my design, given my
sparse Norse mythology, it's possible that it was lurking in there somewhere,
and it's certainly interesting that the other points that I recognised in this
symbol came only after I'd designed it.

Wednesday

In the elements scheme, Wednesday is the day of water, which is usually
represented by triangloform or curved lines. A "W" is a triangloform line of
this nature, hence my use of it; it's also one of only three days in the week
that has an unambiguous leading letter, so it feels fine to use it. This is the
only of the symbols to be rooted in the form of the English name for the
day.

Thursday

Once again using the elements scheme, Thursday is the day of wood. This time
I eventually plumped for using the Japanese character outright: it's simple and
distinctive. I'd investigated many other symbols for wood, and tried to come up
with some of my own based on the clog almanac character for this day, but the
Japanese symbol also has excellent mnemonic characteristics in that it
incorporates a capital letter "T".

Friday

Friday is the day of gold in the elements scheme. Gold was a difficult thing
to find an adequate symbol for because the sun is normally used to represent
it, and that's already taken up by Sunday. So eventually I borrowed an alchemy
trick whereby the symbol for sun was made less ambiguous by tacking an R to it.
Note that in the clog almanac system, a R is used for Friday. The R in the
alchemical sense comes from the latin name for Gold, aurum.

Saturday

This is the only day of the week that isn't based on the Japanese elements
scheme. In the elements scheme this day is the day of earth, but the English
name is derived from the planet Saturn, which has a very obvious and distinct
pictograph. I say pictograph instead of symbol because the astronomical and
astrological symbol for the planet is a stylised representation of the god
Saturn's sickle. I've instead used a circle with a line through it, denoting
the planet and its rings.

Notes

@@ What do you call the etymology of a symbol? Its origin? Doesn't sound
right...